Hibiscus in the Desert

​ I’ve only been creating art for about four years. If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be making and selling art, I would probably have dismissed it.

I did not see this coming. 

I grew up in a house with parents who were exacting. My father was an electrical engineer, my mother a nurse. Everything had a place, everything was very ordered and structured. There was a correct way to do things. There was an incorrect way to do things. 

Growing up in this highly structured environment helped me become a successful professional writer. I can work under pressure, get things done, and meet deadlines. 

Perhaps if my parents had been hippies who had actually let my true artist nature bounce around the backyard in bare feet with a butterfly net in hand*, I would not have grown into an adult able to hold a job.  (I may be slightly exaggerating here. My parents did actually let me run around the backyard in my bare feet… but I did have to clean up afterwards.)

Chaos, Lurking Beneath 

It turns out.. lurking beneath the surface of these learned skills of organization and structure, there was a natural tendency towards creativity. 

When ‘creativity’ finally emerged for me in my early forties, I didn’t recognize it as such. It was more like learning to embrace chaos. Or maybe it was just a desire to take a bunch of seemingly unrelated and scattered items and bring them together in a new way.

I believe it emerged when it did, because I was actually in the process of destroying the life I had carefully built for myself... but that’s a whole other story… for another day.

Art gave me a way to take the scattered pieces of my life, rearrange them, and make something new. 

This is what I did in my latest piece, Hibiscus in the Desert. 

I usually work in encaustic, but was feeling bored and unwilling to go into my cold-as-Alaska basement studio in mid February to work on anything. So, I went to the art store and bought some water colors. 

This is something I could do upstairs.  I thought it might get me out of the art rut I had somehow fallen into.

I got my water and brushes ready and started playing around. But, I just couldn’t help myself. After experimenting with the water colors, I realized, I just wanted to add more stuff to the paper, so I added tissue paper, pieces of cut up dictionary pages, string… I glued them onto the paper.

The glue was messy and I was getting it all over my hands. The tiny bits of dictionary pages were getting stuck to my fingers. The tissue paper bubbled. 

The project was in chaos,  but I let it be.  Somehow, that little bit of playing around in a completely foreign medium had loosened things up a bit.  I was soon down in the basement heating up the wax. I put on an extra sweater and the pair of wool slippers from Nova Scotia to keep my feet warm. 

The Riskiness of Art

The same day I was doing this, I talked to a friend of mine who is struggling with her aging parents. She talked about her father’s desire to drive while going blind and her mother’s dwindling mental capacity.

I said to her, “It’s an impossible situation. You’ve got to balance the need for their independence with your own concern that they might accidentally set themselves on fire because one of them forgot to turn off the stove.”

While she was talking about that, I was talking about getting out of my art rut.

“How did you do it?” she asked, about getting myself out of the rut. 

“You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that got you into the problem… so I stepped outside my usual pattern and way of doing things. I mixed it up and tried something new. Once I did that, something broke free and creativity just started to flow,” I said.

Sometimes brilliant things just fly out of my mouth. This was not one of those times. This time I was just quoting Einstein. 


“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
-Albert Einstein


Einstein was a creative genius.

Art, like living on your own at 87, is a slightly risky endeavor. It can break you open to new ways of seeing, new ways of thinking. And, that’s what I love about it. 

While I still have to meet deadlines for work, I get to play in the realm of possibilities, dream of new ways of being in the world, and create my own piece of the world through my art. 

It satisfies that part of myself that needs to rebel, to create something new, to dismantle the structures of things, throw them on a table, re-arrange them, and imagine  something new. 

​Like a Hibiscus in the desert. 

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